Imagined Spaces at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair
On a late Sunday morning, the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan is busy with excitement and a mild sense of urgency. It is the last day of the 2017 Outsider Art Fair, and the opportunities to see old favorites or discover something new are waning–until next year. With sixty-two exhibitors, this is the event’s biggest iteration […]
Securing the Shadow: The Folk Art Museum Chronicles Death in Early America
The Shadow of Death in America: Securing the Shadow Over the past several years, a surprising niche interest in the arts has turned mainstream in America: death and the end of life. A topic once shielded by the taboo of privacy, this most intimate of experiences has become the subject of thriving discussion. The New […]
Take Me to the Moon: Alma Thomas
Alma Thomas was the first African-American woman to be featured in the White House art collection; the first African-American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the first person to graduate from Howard University with a degree in Fine Art. As an artist who achieved unprecedented success in the […]
Collecting a Human Experience at The Keeper
Holocaust memorabilia, rock crystals, antique vessels, and trash found on the streets of New York City: these are some of the objects in The New Museum’s current exhibition, The Keeper. Discarded pieces of gum and cellophane wrappers are shown side-by-side with photographs documenting the structure of snowflakes. Among the exhibited artifacts are quilts from Alabama […]
Secular Mystic: M’onma Returns to New York
Cavin-Morris Gallery was founded by a couple, Shari Cavin and Randall Morris, around 1980. The project unites their differences. “We have places where we diverge,” Cavin tells me as we chat in a sunlit private room behind the Chelsea gallery. Morris admits that what sparks his interest is the archaeological and anthropological aspects of an […]
Drawing Circles: Hiroyuki Doi Wants You to Know That You Can Make Art
Hiroyuki Doi’s first drawing workshop in the United States is held in the Folk Art Museum’s Collections and Education Center, on a narrow industrial street in Long Island City, Queens. On my way, I realize why Suzanne de Vegh, the museum’s Director of Public Programs, insisted on giving me directions. The street is dominated by […]
Finding Warmth and Feeling at the Outsider Art Fair
The Outsider Art Fair has arrived, and some of the best that the field has to offer is currently on display in the Metropolitan Pavilion. This annual convention of exhibitors of outsider and folk art has existed for over two decades. In recent years, however, it has grown exponentially. Since its acquisition in 2012 by […]
Hardboiled: Gil Batle’s Debut in New York
The few blocks of West 20th Street between 8th Avenue and the Chelsea piers on the Hudson hosts one of the highest concentrations of art galleries in Manhattan. On a cool, misty November evening, most of these galleries on the ground level were brightly lit. In one, an attendant sat unmoving at her desk, sculpture-like […]
Joyful Voyeur: John Kayser’s Playfully Intimate Photography
After John Kayser’s death in 2007, stacks of home-developed black and white photographs and cheap drugstore prints surfaced among his personal effects. Kayser retained few negatives; Chase Martin, gallery manager at Christian Berst Art Brut, speculates that the artist may have deliberately destroyed some of them. It is evident that the photographs, all originals, had […]
May Red Shoes Blaze the Trail: Reflections on an Art Brut Retrospective
In 2011, the American Folk Art Museum in New York relocated when the Museum of Modern Art acquired its building on 53rd Street. Luckily, its new storefront is no less glamorous: located on a busy Manhattan intersection, the museum’s concrete facade is bathed in the bright lights of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts at […]